Channels: Advanced Traffic Insights

Discover where your fans are coming from

It's important to know exactly where your traffic is coming from when sharing your links across platforms. Future marketing efforts must be based on past data, and knowing which sources are performing best is essential to effectively manage your marketing budget.

This is why we have created the Channels tool, a part of the Linkfire platform that gives you accurate and detailed data on where your fans are finding your content.

How channels work

Your Linkfire links all have a unique URL that you use when sharing them across social media, banner advertisements and other sources of traffic. By specifying each of these traffic sources in your board settings, you can create a channel for each. In the section titled "Channels" you can see all of the channels you have available and this is also where you can create new channels. Click the blue “Add Channel” and fill out the “Code” which is the two characters added to the end of your link, enter the name you want to use for your channel and choose a category. We recommend using descriptive names so you can intuitively reference them later.

For example, you might share a link for your newest album on both your label's Facebook page and the artist's Facebook page. In addition, you may be running paid advertisements on Facebook. In order to distinguish between traffic coming from these three sources, you can create three channels called "Facebook Label", "Facebook Artist" and "Facebook Ads" and your data will be separated into these categories.

Now, when you choose to copy the URL for your link inside the Linkfire dashboard, you will be asked: “How do you want to share your link?”. First, choose between whether you will be sharing the link for your landing page or a link for only one specific direct-to-service platform. Thereafter you’re able to choose the specific channel code you wish to add to your link. Depending on which channel you select, Linkfire will append two unique characters to your link, identifying which channel the link is being shared on. At the bottom of the window, you will see a preview of your URL with the two characters.

When a user visits your link, the unique channel URL will ensure that the source of their visit is identified correctly. Creating channels for sources such as Facebook, banner advertisements or your own newsletter is a great way of determining which of your marketing efforts are generating the best result.

Channel insights

To view the detailed insights of your channels usage, head to your ‘Insights’ page for either a single link or your entire board and choose ‘Sources’ in the left column and your ‘Channels’ tab will show. Here you see from which specific channel your traffic is coming from and you can choose whether you want to see visitors or click-through rates for each channel by changing the filter in the top right corner of the channels table.

While this is great for getting an overview, you can see more detailed insights by filtering the results based on your channel name. This way, you will be able to see click-through rates, geographic locations and even iTunes revenue generated by specific sources of traffic. To do so, clicking on the ‘Filter’ drop-down to the right and type in the channel you want to add. You can add several channels at the same time, so see insights across channels.

Tips

Try to plan ahead and create all the channels you will need right away. You can always add more channels later, but you risk polluting your long-term data if you do so. The best way to keep your data comparable over a long period of time is if you have consistent and stable parameters for all of your releases.